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POLITICAL COLUMN

The pain that is politics

'I crawled out of the swamp, and I’m not crawling back in,' Bush said this year. | AP Photo

This is important to the current race for president. The last Democratic administration before Obama’s was Clinton’s. Clinton reigned over a period of rising employment, a rising stock market and prosperity so great it produced a government surplus.

The last Republican administration was George W. Bush’s. It is not remembered for happy times. Russ Douthat, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, wrote a few weeks ago that voters are being asked to roll the dice and hand “the White House back to the Republican Party just four years after the Bush administration failed (and then some) to deliver on its promises.”

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“Romney isn’t giving voters any reason to think that he won’t just deliver the same disappointing results,” Douthat wrote and a “Republican candidate who won’t define himself is a candidate who’s easily defined as just another George W. Bush.”

Ouch.

So even though George W. Bush twice won the presidency (go argue with the Supreme Court about his first victory), he is seen today, Douthat argues, as a loser, a loser Mitt Romney dare not be associated with.

Which is why you are not going to see him in the convention hall this week.

At every convention, I play a little game. I look around for the man or woman in the worst seat in the hall — usually a lonely seat so far from the stage that the speeches are barely rumors.

One year, the man in that seat was George McGovern. McGovern was the Democratic nominee in 1972 and got crushed by Richard Nixon (whose campaign nonetheless felt it necessary to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee to defeat him).

In 1976, McGovern was not invited to the Democratic convention, nor in 1980. I don’t know about 1984, but in 1988, he came. That year, there was a dramatic moment in the Omni convention hall in Atlanta after Michael Dukakis was nominated.

Dukakis invited all the big shots in the party down to the podium to share the stage with him. One by one, they came down until nearly a hundred of them were crowding the stage and waving to the cheering audience.

I went over to a nearly empty patch of the balcony, where George McGovern sat alone.

“Those sons of bitches,” McGovern said to me. “There’s not one policy I had back then that they don’t have now. But now they don’t want to know I exist.”

Pain. They feel the pain.

Twelve years after McGovern was nominated, the party nominated Walter Mondale, who ended up getting even fewer electoral votes than McGovern did.

After his defeat, Mondale called McGovern and asked him when the pain stopped, when you woke up in the morning and did not feel like throwing up.

Readers' Comments (18)

Politico, no one reads this worn out leftist. Note that he never does any actual reporting, he just ruminates or shills for liberal Democrats. You are beginning to look more and more like NYT,staffed by old liberal fogeys with happy memories of the glorious '60's. Result - the plummeting readership and revenue at Politico that is well documented by any Google search.

So the porud liar Bush has not interest like he had interest in killing 1.4 million Iraq1uis over zero WMD's, zero yellow0cake, zero, zilch anything but a bag-full of lies. As a salesman Bush's sales case was always loaded with trash, non salable products.. a full bag og dupes for the "BUYER".

But as "Salesman" he had MSM support, AIPAC, support for the 'bombing'.

Now they want to tell you that Iran is the scourge. Innocents should not be killed.. that'd be God -oriented.. 1947 man made Israel needs to do their own dirty work and they ought pay for it too.

Roger, your piece today was pretty good. I read it all. I'm pretty sure it won't be well received.

Let's make one thing clear, President Obama says Mitt Romney is an extremist. A right wing hate-monger that makes any 1990's Yugoslavian militia leader look like a good will ambassador. Mitt Romney would tear the food stamps from the the grubby fists of every starving child, legal and otherwise. Mitt Romney would force every woman needing the help of an abortionist into a re-education gulag. Mitt Romney would remove any vestige of tax fairness from the wealthy and would reduce the wages of American workers to pennies a day, making their pay equity on par with any third world dictatorship.

President Obama might be more successful if he described Mitt Romney as a loser. He was the last one in this Republican primary to come in first. Unless Ron Paul has some sort of electoral dirty bomb ready to go, Mitt Romney will the nominee in less than 36 hours. Unlike that political power house George W. Bush, Mitt Romney has only won one election. Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Don't Mormons eat their first born and enslave all of their many wives. I'm hope I'm not confusing them with Saudis.

My point is, conservatives want the guy in paragraph one and fear their really going to get paragraph two. President Obama would probably get every single electoral vote, if he painted Mitt Romney as "a moderates moderate". He could say Mitt Romney is a man so obsessed with fairness, he really gets out of bed, form opposite sides everyday. When it comes to American security and foreign policy, a president needs to out of bed on the right side. What if President Obama had got out of bed on the "don't kill Osama Bin Laden today" side of the bed? Where would we be now.

If President Obama used that strategy, voters would go to the polls on November 6th convinced the most merciful thing they could do would be to send Mitt Romney back to one of his vacation homes. And Barack Obama would never have to utter one word about himself and what he may or may not have done in the last four years.

Since Romney is promising (threatening) to double down on Bush/Cheney's trickle down economics; since Romney promises more huge, unaffordable tax cuts for the richest individuals and corporations, more lawless Wild, Wild West on Wall Street, more national debt and squat job production, why isn't George W. being carried into the convention hall in a kingly litter on the shoulders of all these idiot Republicans that plan to endorse that nonsense again? George W. should step out of the lowered litter to hand the Republican scepter to Romney personally amid hosannas and weeping cheers. Yes, Bush and Republican policies (often aided by Democrats) gave us the Great Recession. Yes, Romney plans not only to keep the unaffordable, wasteful Bush tax cuts, but also to add his own huge tax cut across the board, which means he will probably give us another Republican Great Depression instead of recession, but this is what Republicans want (don't ask me why), so why don't they exalt George W. at their convention, since Romney and Ryan are surely going to exalt his tired, failed policies again?

Obama is garbage. He is just as phoney as Edwards was. The same liberal idiots that fell for Edwards, fell hard for Obama.

Bush isn't showing up because he has class, and he knows the liberal propaganda press scum like Simon will try to tie all of their lies about Bush to the rest of the Republicans. Bush is taking one for the team.

History will be very kind to Bush, but it will call Obama out for the massive failure that he is. And history will never remember the gutter slime Simon.

Simon is the lowest of the low. He doesn't know what a real leader is, all he does is lie.

Well. I see that the right wing "truth squad" that follows Roger every time he posts is up early again today. Frankly, I find today's column a fascinating insight into our American Presidential politics and an election's aftermath. McGovern, Dukakis and Bush are all the political flotsam that wash up on the shore years after their own election disasters. Say what you will about their positions, they gave it their all, but, in the end were left at the curb with the rest of the household discards.

Well. I see that the right wing "truth squad" that follows Roger every time he posts is up early again today. Frankly, I find today's column a fascinating insight into our American Presidential politics and an election's aftermath. McGovern, Dukakis and Bush are all the political flotsam that wash up on the shore years after their own election disasters. Say what you will about their positions, they gave it their all, but, in the end were left at the curb with the rest of the household discards.

Yeah, but you are a liberal. You are fascinated by shallow matters than have nothing to do with the real world or real leadership. You and Simon fell for an empty suit who has failed every test of leadership that matters. But you are incapable of understanding that. So go back to caring about Edwards' hair styles, that is about all liberals can manage.

All the Obama team has to say over and over and over is "Do you want to go back to the failed GOP way of handling the economy? After the great success of the Clinton years in the 1990s, the GOP and the eight years of George W. Bush drove us into the worst recession since the Great Depression! Do you really want to go back to the policies and people who got us into the worst recession since the 1930s? Yes, it is taking a bit longer to come out of this recession than others we have experienced in the past - but, again, we haven't experienced anything this severe since the Great Depression. We are making steady progress month after month - and we ARE coming out of it. Let's not go back to square one with the GOP - let's not go back to the people who got us into this horrible mess."

I would say it is like a new, healthy eating routine. You gorged on all of the wrong things for eight years and got really sick and fat. Then you embarked on a healthy eating regimen. The pounds started to drop off - slowly, but consistently. But just because you are not quite back to your original weight are you going to throw up your hands and return to the bad eating regimen that got you fat and sick in the first place? No! You will realize it takes time - but you are almost there!

/> 5-minute video: Declaration of Independence was/is lawful revolution from criminal government www.infowars.com Washington's Blog | A lawful revolution is in response to government that abjectly violates its own laws, and refuses all reasonable offers to return government limits within its own constitution.

Simple Simon says: "Clinton reigned over a period of rising employment, a rising stock market and prosperity so great it produced a government surplus."

Wow...Simple Roger clearly doesn't understand economics. As government surpluses grew under Clinton, wealth was being sucked out of the private sector, and households began to take on greater debt to maintain their standard of living (households began to leverage themselves more as goverment surplus dragged on the private sector). If government is in surplus, private sector most likely is deficit. This is what happened between 1997 - 2007. To be fair, most people on both sides of the aisle do not understand this...

Wow, you are the highest order of douchebag if you worm your way through the stories to find one that he wrote, that wasn't any sort of reporting, just a calm, non-partisan, neat story about past candidates and how they reacted to the years of political turmoil thrown at them. You must be so proud.

Mike Botula: Aug. 27, 2012 - 9:37 AM EST

Frankly, I find today's column a fascinating insight into our American Presidential politics and an election's aftermath.

Exactly. I didn't see this as anything partisan, just a thoguht-provoking piece. OHHHHHHHHHHH, it just dawned on me why the conservatives are up-in-arms....this is one of dem-dare thinks words that aint got purty pictures and pretty ladies on FOX telling me what they want me to think it means.

reason 1: Aug. 27, 2012 - 10:11 AM EST

Yeah, but you are a liberal. You are fascinated by shallow matters than have nothing to do with the real world or real leadership.

I love when folks toss out "you are a liberal" as if that's a bad thing. The same ones that tout their evangelical conservatism as they tap their toes so the boy in the next stall will touch their junk, then slap their wives and tell them to get back in the kitchen.